For this issue, instead of making up some outlandish scenario to explain the above sequence, I thought I’d let you in on some trade secrets. Give you the Ahmad, if you will. Let you in on the complex process we go through to bring you this spread. So put on your hard hats and follow Otis Smith, your Slamadamonth tour guide.

1) RESEARCH—This is by far the most time-consuming part of the process. Mostly, it involves sitting in front of a TV somewhere and watching NBA highlights (we prefer TBS and TNT—ESPN is too dangerous what with all of that baseball). Upon seeing a play that makes us spill our bee—uh, milk—we write down the date, location and participants. We then move on to Step Two.

2) THE PHOTO—This is more complicated than it sounds. Despite the skill level of the NBA’s premier photographers, and the fact that there are generally more cameras focused on each basket than there are spy planes watching China, sometimes the shot just doesn’t happen. For example, based on photographic evidence, Stephon Marbury’s barely unbelievable reverse alley-oop on Sam Mitchell back in December never occurred. In that case, we need to move on to a second (or third, or fourth, or fifth) choice, which means repeat Step One. Once we find a photo that clearly shows the violent nature of an appropriate dunk (like, well… not like this one), we can move on to Step Three.

3) THE VIDEO—This generally works one of two ways. In the usual case, we call and give the NBA video people the pertinent information—date and place, offender and victim, approximate time during the game when the event occurred, and approximate description of the event (for example: “Kevin Garnett faked a three, then drove and dunked all over Raef LaFrentz”). The exception, of course, was in the case of Vince Carter’s dunk on Frederic Weis in Sydney, where we simply needed to promise NBC that we would never make fun of Just Shoot Me.

And that’s about it. We combine those and bring you this. Until next time…

With the regular season wrapped up and teams punching their tickets to the Big Dance, what better time to take a look back at some of the best and most entertaining college teams of the past few decades? First up, we have a Fab Five story from SLAM 52 (June ’01) written by long time contributor Alan Paul. The Fab Five will forever be remembered by fans and critics alike, both for their on- and off-court antics. Meanwhile, this year’s edition of the Wolverines, led by the backcourt duo of Tim Hardaway Jr and Trey Burke, are co-Big Ten champs and have Michigan fans hype heading into March. Enjoy this look back at a classic piece, and expect plenty more to come as the NCAA Tournament approaches.—Ed.

by Alan Paul

“The Fab Five was once in a lifetime! What they achieved will never, ever happen again.”

The familiar voice of Dick Vitale booms through the phone line, scratchy and emphatic. He may be a bit less frenzied off the air, but Vitale can’t contain his excitement when the subject turns to the Fab Five, the heralded freshmen who drove Michigan to consecutive title games in ’92 and ’93. “This story deserves special acclaim,” Vitale says. “I can’t tell you how many times I hear coaches say, ‘We can’t win because we have two freshmen in our rotation.’ It’s absolutely accepted wisdom and the Fab Five turned it on its head. I think what they did is absolutely unique in the history of basketball and doesn’t get the play it deserves.”

Vitale’s statement is accurate but stunning nonetheless. How could the Fab Five be underrated when, despite never winning a league or national championship, they still managed to change the face of college ball? The concept would have been unfathomable nine years ago when Chris Webber, Jalen Rose, Juwan Howard, Ray Jackson and Jimmy King were garnering countless headlines and being covered in a manner more MTV than ESPN.

“They were greeted like rock stars,” recalls Rob Pelinka, a role player on those teams and now an agent whose clients include Jazz rookie DeShawn Stevenson. “We sometimes needed police escorts because our bus would be surrounded by people.”

And just like every new sensation from Elvis to Eminem, there was debate about whether the Fab Five represented something creative and wonderful or arrogant and destructive. Their brash confidence, in-your-face trash talking and hip-hop fashion sense were both embraced and attacked like no college sports team before or since. The debate continues to this day, especially in Ann Arbor, where the basketball team struggles along under a cloud of impropriety that dates back to the Fabs’ recruitment. But one thing is beyond debate: The Fab Five represented something entirely new, an entire class of blue chip recruits covering every position, each of whom lived up to their top billing.

Power forward Webber was Michigan’s Mr. Basketball and the nation’s top recruit. Howard, a 6-9 center, and the 6-5 shooting guard King were the top players in Illinois and Texas, respectively, and Rose was a 6-8 pg who had led Detroit’s Southwestern High to two state titles. Jackson was the only one of the five who wasn’t a McDonald’s All-American, but the 6-6 Texan was one of the nation’s top small forward prospects. And while serendipity and coach Steve Fisher’s intense leg work certainly played huge roles in landing such an esteemed class, the Fab Five also recruited themselves.

“Juwan is responsible for the whole thing,” says Webber today. “Jalen and I had talked about going to school together since we were 12, but Juwan is the one who got it going. He made us believe that we could create something great together.”

Explains Howard, “I started a chain reaction. Jimmy and I met on our visit and decided to go to Michigan. Then I called Chris, because we had become good friends through the All-Star games, and started working on him. I persuaded him and he got a hold of Jalen, which is exactly what I wanted. I was looking to win a national title or two, instead of just going somewhere and being assured of being the man.”

It didn’t take long for the dreams to come to fruition; all five recall that the chemistry was immediate. “The day we all met, we played a pickup game outside our dorm and it was just there,” says Webber.

Nonetheless, it takes a huge leap for a memorable pickup squad to become an NCAA title contender. Most great college teams result from a slow blending of talents, with experience trumping nearly everything else. The Fab Five turned that formula on its head. Juniors Pelinka, James Voskuil, Michael Talley and Eric Riley were key contributors, but clearly support players to the five freshmen, a seemingly impossible situation deftly managed by Fisher and his staff.

“It takes freshmen a while to grasp the college game,” says Randy Ayers, a current Sixers assistant who was the head man at Ohio State at the time. “A high school star has an adjustment period learning to accept sacrificing for the good of the team. That almost always takes a year or two, but the Fab Five found their niches immediately. Chris, Jalen and Juwan were the go-to guys and the Texas kids were the defenders. And they played off each other beautifully.”

Adds Vitale, “These guys truly enjoyed each other’s company and responded as a unit, with the emphasis on the team rather than individual stats. They were a very unselfish team that blended extremely well.”

And, the players all say, they made each other better on a daily basis, filling one another with their trademark confidence. “As a group, we always felt invincible,” says Webber. “Individually, you always have fear and doubt, but we never did as a team. I felt that together we could accomplish anything.”

The Boston Celtics are back atop the Eastern Conference, thanks in large part to Kevin Garnett, who was featured in our latest issue, SLAM 144. A second title this season would cement Garnett’s legacy with Boston, but he’ll still need nine more to catch the immortal Bill Russell. It was Russell who was the centerpiece of the greatest dynasty in the history of the NBA. The 6-9 center is back in the news recently as a debate as to whether he should have a statue in Boston is being discussed. He says he doesn’t care, but there’s no argument here that Russell deserves the honor. –Ed.

by Alan Paul

Bill Russell was basketball’s best defender and greatest victor, winning 11 championship rings in 13 Celtics seasons. But he was also much more-the key figure in modernizing the sport. By refining and popularizing blocked shots, fast-break ball and above-the-rim play, Russell ushered hoops out of the set shot era and into the age of alley oops. An athletic 6-10, 220, he roamed the floor freely, blocking as many shots away from the basket as underneath it while running and handling like a small forward and passing like a guard.

Russell refined his game at the University of San Francisco, where he posted 23 points and 13 blocks in his first game, then closed out his USF career with a stunning 55 consecutive victories and two NCAA titles. He won a gold medal in the ’56 Olympics before joining Red Auerbach’s Celtics and instantly altering the NBA landscape. As a rookie, Russell scored 19 points and grabbed 32 boards in Game 7 of the ’57 Finals to earn his first ring. Over his 13 seasons, Russell won five MVP awards, played in 12 All-Star games and averaged 15.1 ppg and 22.5 rpg. He also battled Wilt Chamberlain in one of the sport’s all-time greatest rivalries. They faced off 142 times in 10 years, with Russell’s teams winning 85 of those meetings.

Russell’s impact wasn’t limited to the court. He was the first black coach of a major sports team, winning his final two titles as the Celtics’ player-coach-with no assistants-and going on to coach Seattle and Sacramento. He was also an outspoken advocate for social and racial justice, vociferously refusing to stay in hotels or eat in restaurants that denied service to blacks who lacked his celebrity status. And he was always an odd, somewhat distant public figure, refusing to sign autographs and insisting that the Celtics retire his number in an empty Boston Garden. Today, the 67-year-old Russell shows little interest in discussing such topics, though he’s happy to talk hoops and quick to explain why he was the right person to write a “how-to” guide to winning, Russell Rules.

“I think I know a lot about the subject,” Russell says. “My college team has the second-longest winning streak in history. My Olympic team still holds the record for greatest margin of victory. And the Celtics were perhaps the best team in the history of American sports. We won eight straight titles and nine of 10 in the decade of the ’60s. To do that against the best basketball players on the planet is remarkable.”

SLAM: You were so heralded for your defensive ability that people often overlook how well-rounded your game was.

RUSSELL: To me, I was a better offensive player than a defensive player. By the end of my first year, I always put the offense in motion, and after a year or two almost all the plays went through me. In fact, Havlicek said after I left, he missed me more on offense than on defense.

SLAM: Passing is often overlooked in post play.

RUSSELL: I’d say 95 percent of people who view the game don’t know about that. Only the really good coaches see how important it is that all your players know how to pass from their position. My ability was unique because I could make the passes from any position, which not many people have ever been able to do. Oscar [Robertson] could, Michael [Jordan] could, and, of course, Magic [Johnson] could. He was probably the best ever at making passes that anybody can catch from any position on the floor.

SLAM: When Wilt entered the League after your third year, many said your era was over. Did that competition become an inspiration?

RUSSELL: No. I’d set a standard to win and that didn’t change. Wilt was an enormously talented man and I wasn’t going to do things that would inspire him to play harder, even if that meant giving him an easy basket here and there. You have to understand, this was a great, great player. And you had to keep things in perspective. He was a guy you couldn’t dominate physically or mentally. You can’t play somebody else’s game and have a chance to win. We had a style when he arrived, and the idea was to maintain that style, because it was successful.

Wilt’s numbers speak for themselves: 100 points in a game, 27 rebounds averaged in a season! But after he did all these things, Wilt kept on not winning, and people never understood that, so they started criticizing him. But I never did. I thought he was great. Basically, I saw it as he had an agenda and I had an agenda. And we both fulfilled our agendas.

SLAM: Though I’m sure Wilt would have liked to win more games against you.

RUSSELL: Well, he’d have to get in line for that. There wasn’t a player who I played against who didn’t wish they had won more.

SLAM: It’s sad that Jerry West views his career largely as a failure because of his inability to beat the Celtics. If the positions had been switched and you’d been to the Finals many times only to lose, would you feel like a failure?

RUSSELL: I don’t know. You have to view your career from what it is and not what it might have been. I don’t speculate.

SLAM: What is the key to getting yourself in the position to win?

RUSSELL: First of all, understand that it’s a game you’re playing. Then figure out how to take the skills you have and make them have an effect on how the game is played.

SLAM: But you changed the way the game is played. For instance, in your first NCAA championship, you threw down two reverse alley oops which demoralized LaSalle. Were you making that stuff up as you went, or were others playing that style somewhere?

RUSSELL: I was basically making it up as I went. But K.C. [Jones] was the only one making passes like that to me. The others were shooting so badly, I’d just grab the ball and put it in.

SLAM: You also changed defensive concepts by leaping to block shots, which was considered fundamentally wrong. Where did you learn that?

RUSSELL: When you play seriously every day, you discover things about the game. You find out things you can’t do, and you find out what you can do. Knowing the rules is very important, because they tell what you can do, just as much as they tell you what you can’t do.

SLAM: Sometimes, rules change. The NCAA doubled the width of the lane to slow you down.

RUSSELL: They said that, but it was actually one of the most helpful things they could’ve done because I was very mobile. It made the big slow guys add another step to their positioning, which gave me more room to operate.

SLAM: In college, you and K.C. spent as much time talking about basketball as playing it. Did those conversations help your development?

RUSSELL: Oh yeah! When you talk about your craft, you begin to pinpoint the things that bother you and understand how to either avoid them or improve them. How do you change if you always commit a foul in a certain situation or keep finding yourself in a place on the court where you can’t make a shot? The other thing is developing an understanding of your opponents’ mentality. You have to understand what makes a player repeat the habits he relies upon. Even very good players want to do the things they’re most comfortable with. If you know that, you know how to act to force him away from those things. If you don’t know, then you’re just gonna have to react as he does them, and you are at a disadvantage.

SLAM: You’ve said before that a great basketball player should strive to play with honesty and integrity. What does this mean to you?

RUSSELL: It’s about taking whatever your skills are and using them as best as you can, for as much time as you can.

SLAM: How would you describe your relationship with Red Auerbach?

RUSSELL: From the very first game it was obvious that he respected my talent and skills, and that he respected me as a person. When people respect you, you respect them.

SLAM: You joined the League only seven years after the first black player, and many fans were still nasty. Was that hard to deal with?

RUSSELL: No. That was never a factor. Fans all over the country were racist and obnoxious, some places more and some less, but I never permitted that to have an adverse effect on my playing, and within the Celtics that did not exist.

SLAM: How did you end up as the Celtics’ player/coach after Red retired?

RUSSELL: Red offered me the job first and I said I wasn’t interested. So he asked if I had any recommendations and said that he would not hire anyone who I didn’t approve of 100 percent, because I had meant too much to the franchise. I had some ideas, but we couldn’t work out a deal. Frank Ramsey, who was my first choice, couldn’t leave home. [Bob] Cousy couldn’t get out of his contract at Boston College and so on. Red came up with one last name, and I just wasn’t going to play for that person, so I decided that I would, in fact, do it.

SLAM: And you became the first black coach in the history of American sports.

RUSSELL: Which had absolutely nothing to do with getting my job done, from my viewpoint. The biggest advantage of the change is I was starting to get bored. We had won eight straight NBA championships. That is enough of a statement of anything you want to say, so the question becomes, “What’s next?” Taking the job forced me to totally re-immerse myself in the game. I had to take all of Red’s concepts and strategies and incorporate them in my own way.

SLAM: Your first year as coach ['66-67], the streak was ended by the Sixers, who some call the best team ever. What made them so good?

RUSSELL: They came together for a season as a completely compatible group, in terms of both physical talent and attitude. They surrounded Wilt with some extraordinary players who nobody talks about now. Guys like Chet Walker, Luke Jackson, Hal Greer, Larry Costello, Wali Jones and Matt Guokas, with the great Billy Cunningham off the bench. And they played together as a unit. They didn’t defer to anyone.

SLAM: When they beat you, Philly fans carried a sign reading “Boston is dead,” which many believed. Did you have any crisis of confidence?

RUSSELL: No. We lost that one and then won two more. Last year’s championship is only important in how other teams fear you; you still have to go out and beat everyone again. People say there were better teams than the Celtics, but we set the standard. A given team might come up for a year, but only we could sustain it.

SLAM: The game’s next great center, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, came into the League the year you left. What are your thoughts about him?

RUSSELL: His sky hook was one of the greatest innovations in sports. There has never been anyone built quite like Kareem, and the shot’s brilliance is that it is completely unique to his physical abilities and proportions.

SLAM: Elvin Hayes said that in his first game against you, he took a shot and you came out of nowhere and just crushed it. It really shook him up, but after the game you gave him some advice, which boosted his confidence.

RUSSELL: When a new big man came into the League, I wanted to make sure they knew I was around, and to establish that there were boundaries that should not be crossed. But I also wanted every player in the League playing as well as possible, because I wanted the League to be totally elite. It always made me feel good to hear people say, “The greatest athletes in the world play in the NBA.”

SLAM: You bridged generations, finishing your career against Hayes after starting against pioneers like Dolph Schayes. Why was he so good?

RUSSELL: He was completely tenacious. He worked as hard as anyone. One story stands out: One time he got submarined and broke the wrist on his shooting hand. When the doctor cast it, Dolph had him leave his fingers out. He never missed a game, and neither his shooting percentage nor his scoring average went down.

SLAM: What defined Bob Pettit’s game?

RUSSELL: He was a great, great player who came at you relentlessly. He was very aggressive, played really hard, knew what he could do and stayed within that. There are about a half dozen players who were extraordinarily competitive and he was one of them, along with Michael, Bird, Magic, Wilt and Oscar, who was probably the most competitive of all.

SLAM: What was it like to play with Cousy?

RUSSELL: It was easy, because not only was he a great player, but the things he did were completely in sync with what I did. He would transition from defense to offense as his guy went to the basket, because he knew I’d take care of him. I knew which way he’d force him, and I’d be there waiting while also cutting off his passing lanes. Meanwhile, Bob was heading downcourt, so we’d take control of the offense while the other team still had the ball. Nobody had done that before, because they didn’t have the ingredients, namely a great rebounder and defender to grab the ball and turn it around, and a fast, in-control guard to throw to.

SLAM: As much as your style of play changed the center position, was there anyone who came after you who captured your style?

RUSSELL: Maybe it’s egotism, but I have never seen another player who even approached the way I played the game in terms of depth. I’ve never seen anyone do the number of things I do well.

The 6th Man: With apologies to Lauryn Hill, it’s funny how Mourning changed a situation. Up until, I don’t know, two weeks before this issue’s deadline, the Philadelphia 76ers were supposed to be on the cover and my incredibly prescient NCAA bracket was supposed to be on this page. But then Duke beat Arizona in the final, trashing all of my previous predictions (I did pick the Final Four and the final game—really) and the Sixers—well, let’s just say they upped their practice schedule.

So, what to do? Shaq woulda been the Big Easy, but we’d done that. Dajuan decided to go to college, and besides, it was gonna be playoff time. And Bison Dele wasn’t returning our calls. Things were starting to get tight. We were late like J.R. Rider, getting ready to check into rehab with Shawn Kemp.

And then it happened. “What about Alonzo Mourning?” A quick look at the wall—no Zo on the cover since October. Of ’96. His comeback was startling, not because he was playing like the Zo of old, but because he was playing at all. It was definitely The Story (besides the Great Chalupa Shot of Whang Zhi Zhi, of course). Then again, we only had three days to set up the cover shoot, and Alonzo was probably busy, what with getting himself into shape and talking to reporters and fighting focal glomerosclerosis and all. But what the hell—we made the call to Heat P.R. director Tim Donovan anyway. Worst thing that could’ve happened was that he (or Zo) would say no.

Except they didn’t. So, in space normally reserved for mockery and ridicule, instead there are heartfelt thanks. To Tim Donovan, who pulled things together. To Atiba Jefferson, who pulled stakes at the last minute to shoot the thing. To Scoop Jackson, who rolled to Miami to get the real. And most of all to Alonzo Mourning, who, during the most stressful time of his life, made time for someone else. Us. So thanks, Zo, and good luck.